Anatomy of a Technocratic Centrist
When management replaces politics and consent becomes optional.
At twenty minutes to five on the morning of 24 June 2016, the BBC’s David Dimbleby announced the result of Britain’s referendum on Europe.
“The British people have spoken,” he said. “The answer is: we’re out.”
Sterling went into freefall. Remain-voting politicians reacted with open incredulity – some with something close to grief. “God help this country,” tweeted one of them – a sentiment shared by practically everyone in the establishment.
Brexit marked the start of something that remains unresolved, and that has arguably done lasting damage to trust in democratic politics ever since – not just in the UK but across the West. The election of Trump did the same in the US. What helped produce both – and intensified in the aftermath – was a collapse of trust in technocratic governance.
In the years that followed, two different but related grievances solidified into rival expressions of resentment. One side raged at how the public could have got it so wrong. The other at why the political class treated their vote with such contempt.
This is not a piece about Brexit, nor really about Britain – although most of the examples come from there. It’s about a mindset at the centre of political discourse across Western democracies, flanked on one side by the leftist who performs moral certainty while evading reality. On the other, a growing backlash on parts of the right, which mirror woke pathologies while claiming to oppose them.
This is about the people in the middle – the “grown-ups” and “sensibles” who claim to be above all this tribal nonsense. These are the centrists: specifically, technocratic centrists – people who treat politics as an engineering problem, who are convinced they are the last adults left in a room full of squabbling children.
The technocratic centrist is not always the leading character in the political story of the last few decades, but he’s in every scene. It’s the middle-aged man in a grey suit, lanyard in place of a tie, speaking in management clichés and pre-approved talking points. It’s the woman with impeccable credentials and a studied air of competence, media-trained, every line delivered with rehearsed authority.
For simplicity, I’ll refer to this specific type of centrist as a “he” for the rest of this piece, but make no mistake, this is not a sex we’re talking about but a class – the managerial class, or lanyard class as I’ve come to think of them.
For the centrist, politics isn’t about competing visions of the good life. He might use the word philosophy, but only as a synonym for approach – as in, our philosophy is to collect as much data as possible before making decisions. Real philosophy, the messy 2,500-year argument about what kind of society we should build, barely registers. He probably thinks Socrates is a learning app.
Instead, the concern is with evidence-based policymaking, independent reviews, and getting the comms right. Politics is about “managing stakeholders”, examining data and following protocols. It’s a mechanism that needs handling with expertise.
For a while, this way of governing seemed to work. Yes, there were problems, but growth papered over the cracks, institutions still had credibility, and most people assumed the ship was staffed by a competent crew, with the most competent among them at the helm.
Then, quite suddenly, public trust collapsed. Voters started behaving unpredictably – rejecting “sensible policies”, misunderstanding instructions and choosing the wrong answers.
The centrist saw this and responded the only way he knew how. He tightened his grip on the wheel, twiddled a few dials, and steamed ahead. What he didn’t do – and still refuses to do – is ask whether the vessel he’s captaining is actually seaworthy and whether the passengers might have a point.
You can spot him by three characteristics.
Credentials outrank consent
Democracy is a touchy subject for the centrist, not because he opposes it – he’d be horrified at the suggestion. It’s because he believes political questions are complex and should be settled by experts.
He knows this to be true because the electorate keeps getting things wrong. They won’t listen to reason, or can’t comprehend the facts, which is vexing considering how much time he’s spent nudging them toward the correct views. When they don’t get the memo, it’s treated as a cognitive error, a learning disability. What’s needed, then, is better communication – perhaps more graphs and statistics. The colour red for bad.
Anything except the possibility that ordinary people understand perfectly well but simply disagree.
Nowhere does the question of consent matter more than in the case of decades-long mass immigration.
From the Norman Conquest in 1066 until the middle of the twentieth century, net immigration into Britain was negligible by modern standards – likely well under a million people in total across nearly nine hundred years. With the election of Labour in 1997, Britain added more than three million people through net migration in just over a decade.
This transformation was not put to the electorate as a clear choice. There was no manifesto spelling out the scale, nobody suggested a referendum, and voters were not consulted in any meaningful way about a policy that would significantly transform the nation. Instead, it was framed as a technical necessity, an economic good. GDP numbers were talked about, experts nodded sagely that all was well, the future bright.
What never quite entered the discussion was consent. Unlike tax rates or welfare spending, this was not a policy voters could reverse at the next election. It was a structural transformation of the country itself, implemented on the assumption that legitimacy could be derived from expertise alone.
This is the technocratic instinct in its purest form. The public is excluded from decisions of enormous moral and social consequence on the grounds that they cannot be trusted to think clearly about them. When voters object, the response is to defame them as xenophobic or racist. Lacking public consent for changing a country utterly, centrists – aided by the media – rendered even the most reasonable and polite dissent somehow questionable, distasteful, even taboo.
When the centrist and the progressive align – as they often do on issues like immigration – it’s because the latter supplies the moral language that legitimises decisions the former made without democratic consent.
Process replaces moral language
When Jon Wedger submitted a list of fifty girls being sexually exploited in London – along with car registrations, dates, and locations – he was told to back off because he was generating “extra work”.
That’s the technocratic centrist’s moral reflex in operation, treating obvious wrongdoing as a procedural problem. Instead of condemning what’s happened, he describes the machinery for addressing it, involving (of course) “independent reviews” and “stakeholder consultations”.
Later there’ll be reviews of reviews and eventually the whole thing will be memory-holed as the public’s attention turns elsewhere. He might sincerely believe the right procedure produces the right outcome. But moral clarity is treated as distraction at best and “problematic” at worst because it invites judgement, which risks sounding a bit -phobic.
The process is designed to protect institutions from the disruption – the embarrassment, really – of having to name the evil and act on it. The word moral has largely disappeared from institutional vocabulary for this reason, although rights and justice remain because they can be managed administratively.
But moral clarity requires you to name what’s happening and judge it to be wrong. Process lets you avoid both.
Britain’s grooming gangs scandal ran for years on this logic. It still goes on. The process was sound, they say. “Stakeholders” were consulted at length, we’re assured. Protocols followed to the letter. The girls were raped anyway.
Accountability lives elsewhere
Nothing is ever quite the centrist’s decision. It’s always the independent commission’s recommendation or the expert panel’s conclusion. This is not accidental. It means nothing is ever quite his fault.
For years, Britain’s gender clinics dismissed concerns about medicalising children as transphobia. Confused teenagers, many struggling with other issues entirely, were fast-tracked into irreversible treatments. The issue eventually drew enough scrutiny to warrant the Cass Review. It found systemic safeguarding failures and remarkably weak evidence for the affirmation-only approach. Teenagers, confused by definition, were often just going through a phase. Many were simply gay.
The Tavistock clinic didn’t operate in a vacuum. It existed within a system built by the technocratic centrist. He appointed the bodies meant to oversee it, set their terms of reference, and controlled their funding. More importantly, he created the conditions under which anyone raising concerns could be dismissed as a bigot.
When the inquiry concluded, he could point to the procedures he’d designed and ask, quite genuinely, what more he could have done.
What produces the technocratic centrist
He didn’t appear out of nowhere. He emerged from a system that treats politics as administration and voters as a problem to be managed through messaging and procedure.
For years, this worked. Tony Blair was the platonic ideal – slick, data-driven, a master of spin who convinced voters that policy was a technical matter best left to experts. Clinton ran the same playbook in America. Favourable economic conditions made it all look sustainable, with growth blurring out the contradictions. The fair weather didn’t last.
The 2008 financial crisis was the iceberg we were told would never come. Instead of reconsidering the foundations, the system doubled down. More debt. More central bank intervention. Asset holders protected while ordinary people absorbed the losses.
Within a decade, Brexit upended Britain and America elected Trump.
The technocratic response to Brexit and Trump wasn’t introspection but blame and contempt. Voters had misunderstood the terms of service and were now being misled by populists. Ever since, the centrist has pointed gravely at the evils of “disinformation” and foreign interference. He never asks whether his own approach – managing dissent rather than earning consent – created the blowback he now claims to fear.
None of this is to deny that modern governance involves genuine complexity or painful trade-offs. Of course it does. Democracy is chaotic, bad-tempered and painfully slow to reform. But that messiness – impossible to hide – is essential in that it exposes which errors need correcting.
The problem is not that political decisions are hard, but that disagreement has been reclassified as error.
The centrist keeps winning elections he’s already lost. He governs not by persuasion but by exhaustion, endlessly nudging people in the right direction like a border collie herding sheep. People vote for him not because he inspires anything but because the alternatives (so they’re told over and over again) are dangerous.
His victories are negative mandates: votes against something worse, not votes for anything better. Centrists scrape through final rounds by the thinnest margins, beating populists who won the most votes in the first round. They win by being less frightening than the monster they’ve spent the entire campaign warning you about.
Some of the movements the centrist warns us about really are dangerous. Some rhetoric really does corrode democratic norms. But the technocratic centrist mistakes the symptoms for the disease and prescribes more of what caused it.
What he doesn’t understand is that a politics that treats consent as optional will eventually lose it.
The ship is taking on water. Everyone can see it. The captain is still below deck, adjusting the instruments.
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Excellent diagnosis of the technocratic centrist mindset.
I’d extend your argument slightly: the problem is not only that politics has become managerial rather than democratic, but that it has also become internationalised.
Large parts of the political class now orient themselves less around the sentiments of “Middle England” and more around elite transnational discourse — UN frameworks, EU legal regimes, Davos priorities, climate targets, migration conventions.
In that world, legitimacy flows horizontally from peer institutions rather than vertically from voters. Agreement with fellow elites matters more than consent from the electorate.
This helps explain the sense of cultural and political dislocation many voters feel. Their representatives are not simply ignoring them; they are operating within an entirely different moral and institutional universe — one where the nation state is just one stakeholder among many.
This is part three in a loose trilogy on left, right, and centre (links to the earlier pieces above). Comments open for a bit. Probably lots to disagree with here, so have at it.
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Thanks for reading.